Thousands of tonnes of Marlborough lees could be transformed into a soil-enrichment treatment for vineyards through a new programme led by Bragato Research Institute (BRI).
The Marlborough Circular Wine Programme will see lees (the sediment left over from the winemaking process) collected from participating wineries, and combined with beneficial materials including compost, marine waste and biochar to produce a product that can be spread underneath vines to return organic matter and nutrients to vineyard soils.
The plan offers a solution to a widely-felt problem: the large volumes of lees produced over a relatively short winemaking period during and after vintage are expensive for wineries to get rid of. Disposing of them also puts pressure on regional wastewater and waste-management services, which are faced with potentially hundreds of wine producers all presenting their lees waste at landfill at roughly the same time. Currently, wineries pay a disposal fee to get rid of their lees waste, but the new scheme will see their lees collected and a finished soil-amendment product returned at no extra cost.
db caught up with Dr. Seth Laurenson, sustainability research leader for Bragato Research Institute, to find out how the NZ$6.98 million initiative could transform Marlborough wine.
Significant scale
According to Laurenson the last 18 months has been spent getting the programme ready to operate— “working out where and how we would receive the lees, securing the necessary consents, bringing the right partners together, and developing a robust proposal with our government funding partner,” he told db.
The total investment so far is a combined NZ$6.98 million: $2.79 million coming from New Zealand’s government, NZ$4.19 million from trade association New Zealand Winegrowers, and the rest from participating wineries as well as environmental group The Green Circle and Marlborough District Council.
“We knew this needed to be done at significant scale to test and refine the logistics, and because it is the first programme of its kind operating at commercial scale within New Zealand’s wine sector,” Laurenson said.
As such, “around 3 000 tonnes of lees each year will be collected, processed efficiently and the finished product distributed back to vineyards.”
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